Please write about NVidia's 2D performance problems

[unimatrix]

Well, in that case this is not necessarily a problem with the nVidia drivers, it is something that has different causes. Discussing it in this thread is not really appropriate since it would make people blame one part of the system when others are responsible.

That's why I'd like to get to the core of this issue. To blame the right part.
The thing that bothers me is, many people claim they do not have this problem. Just today I spoke to somebody on IRC who uses similar software. He's using the 180 nvidia driver with default xorg.conf settings. That is what lead me to believe that it is a problem with nvidia. But on the other hand, my older computer (Celeron 2GHz) has an ATI card in it and the situation is even worse. So it's really confusing and I would love to get to the bottom of this.

Everyone has different expectations when it comes to using a computer, for some it's applications that matter, for others the eye candy, some value responsiveness while others place number crunching performance on top.

And I firmly believe that Linux has the potential of doing all of that

I never gave it much thought because I care more for using a free OS than snappy text-boxes, but it is a nagging problem and one that gives newcomers a feel of "slowness" that they associate with the whole OS...

Exactly. This has to be fixed. It is most likely one of the greatest obstacles in desktop Linux adoption.
It's why people claim Linux is slower than Windows, when in reality it's not - for example Mathematica on Linux calculates twice as fast than on Windows on my computer.

Perhaps this should be addressed more seriously by the X.Org/Qt/GTK/etc. devs, there are certainly ways of improving it without switching to a whole different display system like Wayland (which AFAIK does not work on nVidia yet). I'd start bugging them on mailing lists and bug trackers, but wait until the whole KMS/GEM/Gallium thing stabilizes, there's little hope of any kind of improvement until then.

Yes, well ATI and Intel cards have a very promising future. But what about nvidia? AFAIK the GPL nature of KMS/GEM/Gallium stuff doesn't allow them to implement it in their closed-source driver.

[nanonyme]

Yes, well ATI and Intel cards have a very promising future. But what about nvidia? AFAIK the GPL nature of KMS/GEM/Gallium stuff doesn't allow them to implement it in their closed-source driver.

Well, let's see. They could just start supporting Nouveau with specs and manpower like AMD/ATi and Intel do for the respective openource driver projects.

[energyman]

Well, let's see. They could just start supporting Nouveau with specs and manpower like AMD/ATi and Intel do for the respective openource driver projects.

but that would be reasonable. Oh noes!